Tis the season for chocolate biscuits

Yes, it is March and yes, Lachie is wearing a Father Christmas outfit. He is super cuddly in all that red velour. Yesterday we made our favorite biscuits - I can't believe I havn't posted this recipe before! These biscuits came from the Pure margarine website which is excellent - you tell them what you want to avoid and they give you recipes. They have lots of different versions of a shortbread recipe and this chocolate chip version is really very fine. I have been eating these biscuits all morning. They are loved by the gluten-free and gluten-eating alike and have a lovely melt in the mouth texture that you don't seem to get that often in gluten-free baking!

Chocolate Chip Cookies (gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free)

200g Pure (dairy-free) margarine
100g caster sugar
200g rice flour
30g cocoa
100g chocolate chips (eg Dr Oetker plain chocolate chips which are dairy free)

Cream together the margarine and sugar and then mix in the other ingredients to get a thick dough. Lachie loves pouring in the chocolate chips (and then stealing them back out of the bowl).
Roll into little balls and arrange on a baking tray - I usually get at least 30 biscuits - and flatten each one with a fork. The biscuits don't spread when cooking so they can be fairly close together.
Bake at 170 degrees Celsius for 12 - 15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack and try to resist eating them all while the chocolate chips are still molten.

If we are going to toddlers we usually take a couple of these in a tin for Lachie to eat, and Hamish is also partial to a couple on the way home from school.

Back from the brink...

It has been a quiet time on Lachie's Allergy Cookbook, primarily because Lachie hasn't needed much cooking. The wee chap has been poorly for a long time now, or that is how it feels to me! His third ear infection since Christmas was treated with a double dose of Erythromycin which gave him awful nappy rash and made him sick. He then picked up a horrible gastric bug which lasted another 5 days (and which he kindly passed on to his big brother), and that was followed by another 7 days with no appetite and much sleepiness. It is a very very sad time when Lachie cannot be tempted by crumble or cake and when he sits in his buggy just holding a biscuit because he doesn't have the appetite to eat it.

Anyway, this weekend he seems to have turned a corner and is back to three meals a day. This morning at the swimming pool his little trunks, usually skin tight, were all baggy and he spent most of the session saying 'Hungry! Hungry!' So it is official, Lachie is back from the brink.

Iced Chocolate Fairy Cakes

This is a recycled recipe as the mixture is the same as for the Snowflake Chocolate Cake, but in celebration of Lachie's return to normal life I made him some Chocolate Fairy Cakes. Half the Snowflake Chocolate Cake mixture will make 12 fairy cakes and I bake them for 20 minutes. When they were cool I iced them with simple water and icing sugar white icing and decorated with chocolate sprinkles - multicoloured hundreds and thousands contain gluten! So chocolate sprinkles it must be. Lachie was very pleased with them and after his first bite said... 'Mmmm'.

Welcome back Lachie!

Lemon Dream Cookies

Poor wee Lachie has been down with another ear infection so he had to stay at home this afternoon rather than heading off to the pool with Hamish and Robert. Never mind, we did some baking instead! Last week I saw some Dove Farm gluten-free lemon biscuits in Morrisons and felt inspired to attempt something similar. Lachie and I got inventive and adapted a recipe for Dream Cookies that Granny has had for as long as I can remember.

Lemon Dream Cookies (free from gluten, dairy and eggs)

4oz dairy-free margarine
3oz caster sugar
4 1/2oz gluten-free self-raising flour
juice and zest of half a lemon

Cream together the sugar and margarine. Stir in the flour and lemon. For normal dream cookies this would make a mixture you can roll into balls. I thought the gluten-free flour would soak up the lemon juice but this didn't seem to be the case and this actually makes a cakie sort of mix. Spoon the mix into 16 pieces onto a greased baking sheet (Lachie got a bit anxious at this stage, obviously thinking I'd forgotten a key ingredient and started shouting 'Chocolate chips! Chocolate chips!' but I perservered - not all biscuits have to contain chocolate chips Lachie!). Bake in the oven for 15 minutes at 160 degrees celsius and cool on a wire rack.

As you can see from the picture, Lachie couldn't wait to get his hands on one and Hamish also thought they were pretty good when he came home from the pool. They have a crunch on the outside but are chewy within and really very nice. I'll go and try another one now just to make sure...
Mmm yes, subtly lemony too.

A delicious chocolate pudding

As previously mentioned puddings are the order of the day in our house! We are trying to fatten up Lachie's big brother Hamish who seems to have become very skinny (not Lachie though who has quite a tum). This recipe is one I used when we were only dairy- and egg-free and I have just changed the flour to make an exceedingly good gluten-free version. It is one of those brilliant puddings where the sponge appears above a chocolate sauce. I think it is especially yummy if you use Green and Black's Maya Gold chocolate for a subtle orangey spiciness!


Lachie's Self-Saucing Chocolate Sponge Pudding (free from gluten, dairy and eggs too)

For the sponge
2 oz dark chocolate (dairy-free)
1/2 oz dairy-free margarine
1/4 pint soya milk
6oz sugar
4oz gluten-free self raising flour (eg Dove Farm)

For the sauce
2oz soft brown sugar
3oz caster sugar
2 tbsp cocoa
8floz water

Melt the chocolate, margarine and milk together in a pan on a low heat. Stir into the flour and sugar and beat together to a cake mix consistency - add a bit more milk if it is too stiff. Pour the mixture into a small casserole. Put the sauce ingredients straight on top of the sponge - there is no need to mix them together. Pour over the water and bake at 160 degrees Celsius for 1 hour. Leave to cool a little bit before serving.

I must say that I think this recipe is too much for 2 adults and two children under five, however it always gets finished. I don't know where they put it.

Just because they're dairy-free doesn't mean they can't be cow shaped

Now that Lachie is on his gluten-free diet as well as being egg- and dairy-free, his talking has really come on. He has been really extrememly vocal today and his two most commonly used words are 'cake!' and 'biscuits!' which he always says with an exclamation mark. Today he has added a new word in response to my telling him there were no biscuits, which is 'bake!' So bake we did, some gingerbread men and Lachie's personal favourite, gingerbread cows. As Robert said this afternoon, 'just because they're dairy-free doesn't mean they can't be cow-shaped'.
When I started gluten-free baking I steered clear of flour blends and was mixing various flours as we do for our bread. But I am now a convert to Dove Farm flour blends which just seem to be brilliant. For these biscuits I use the self-raising version as the original recipe included bicarbonate of soda, and it seems to work really well.

Gingerbread cows (Gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free)

2oz dairy-free margarine
2oz soft light brown sugar
2oz syrup
7oz gluten-free self-raising flour
1 tsp ground ginger

Cream together the margarine and sugar until it turns light and soft. Mix in the remaining ingredients until they form a dough - this is hard work and everything goes worryingly crumbly for a while. Pop the dough in the fridge for 10 minutes.
Roll out the cooled dough on a gluten-free floured surface to about 4mm (I always have to remember to flour the rolling pin too or the rolling pin picks up the dough!) and cut out whatever shapes you would like. We favour cows and men. Arrange the biscuits on a greased baking tray and bake for 7 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. Our cows are usually just turning brown around the ankles at this stage. Cool on a wire rack and enjoy eating your herd.

Lachie took some of these biscuits to share with Hamish when we picked him up from school.

Fruit Crumble

Both my boys have been ill and I am trying to feed them up, meaning puddings at tea time are essential. Our most frequent pudding is fruit crumble, the favourite being blackberry and apple. We have both of these growing in our garden and I freeze them away in the autumn to keep us going through the winter. Sadly we have now run out so I'm now using frozen summer fruits from the supermarket which are very nice but don't give you that satisfied feeling of knowing they came from just outside the back door. Crumble is a brilliant gluten-free pudding and I find that there is really no difference in taste or texture simply substituting rice flour for wheat flour.

Fruit Crumble (gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free)

4 1/2oz rice flour
3oz dairy free margarine
3oz demarara sugar
enough fruit to give a good covering on the bottom of your dish

Rub the margaine into the flour until it goes to crumbs, stir in the sugar and spoon on top of the fruit. Very easy. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes.

On the rare occaision that there is any left over, Lachie likes to have cold crumble for breakfast the next day!

Cinnamon muffins for a cold day

It is freezing in Skipton this week. The boys and I have been venturing out for short walks in the morning and spending the afternoon at home with the stove on. This afternoon Lachie and I baked these yummy muffins for a mid-afternoon snack. Don't be put off by the prunes - chopped up they are just like jumbo raisins!

Cinnamon muffins (gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free)

8oz gluten-free self raising flour (we use Dove Farm)
5oz light muscovado sugar
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 banana, mashed
1/4 pint soya milk
6 tbsp sunflower oil
6oz prunes, chopped

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl and beat the milk, oil and banana together in a jug. Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and mix lightly. Stir in the chopped prunes. If the mixture seems a bit thick I add a drop more milk - maybe this depends on the banana?! Spoon the mixture into muffin cases in a tray. I can usually get at least 10 muffins out of this mixture. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes and cool on a wire rack.

A Chocolate Yule Log

The hardest aspect for me of Lachie's food allergies is that he doesn't understand. It's one thing telling a four year old that something will make them sick, but when you're two it is a hard concept to grasp. He wants to have whatever his big brother is having, especially if it's some sort of pudding. Nigella Lawson has a recipe in her book Feast for a Buche de Noel (chocolate log) which I thought looked like a lovely thing to make for the children to have on Christmas Day. This recipe uses a flourless sponge so is already gluten-free and is really easy to adapt for a dairy-free diet. But of course a flourless sponge is heavy on the egg so it was out of bounds for Lachie. I should say now that this recipe will either show my dedication to helping Lachie feel like part of the gang or reveal me to be crazy. Basically, I made Nigella's Buche de Noel, but added a two inch extension to the log made of our favourite gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free chocolate cake (see the snowflake cake), and an extra side branch, and then covered the whole thing in the same icing. It looked fab, the children loved it, and Lachie was convinced he was having what everybody else was having. We will definitely be making another one next year!

Chocolate Yule Log (gluten-free, dairy-free, and with an egg-free extension!)


For the sponge
6 eggs separated
150g caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
50g cocoa

For the icing
175g dairy-free dark chocolate
250g icing sugar
225g dairy-free margarine (Nigella's recipe uses butter)
1 tsp vanilla extract (Nigella uses 1 tbsp)


For the egg-free extension
1 chocolate cake made to the recipe given in the Snowflake Chocolate Cake recipe


To make the sponge it helps to have two really big bowls. In one bowl whisk the egg whites, adding 50g of the sugar when they are foamy, and keeping whisking until they are forming soft peaks. In the other bowl whisk the yolks and the remaining sugar until they are pale. Fold in the sugar and vanilla extract. Fold into the yolk mixture a couple of spoons of egg white. Fold in the rest of the egg whites a third at a time. Pour the mixture into a swiss roll tin lined with greaseproof paper and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. After the cake has cooled a bit tip it out onto another sheet of greaseproof.

To make the icing first melt the chocolate and leave it to cool. Cream together the icing sugar and dairy-free margarine and mix in the chocolate and vanilla extract.

To assemble the log, spread icing onto the sponge and roll it up as tightly as you can. (If you want to trim the edges of the sponge you can use these pieces to make branches.) I then iced this cake completely before adding the egg-free extensions and branches (to ensure there was a layer of icing separating the two types of cake).

For the gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free extensions, cut pieces from the chocolate cake of the correct size to fit on the end of the log, or to make branches, and then cover these too in icing.) I found I had plenty of icing to do this following Nigella's quantities.

For a snow effect, dust the log with icing sugar. And we added Father Christmas on his sledge.